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The December dawn violated the night sky, ploughing runnels of crimson and ochre in its wake, like a giant taloned hand gouging fresh wounds over old. Or maybe that was just how I was feeling at eight am on a Monday morning having kept myself awake with a mix of Red Bull and whisky for the second night in a row.

The reason for my devoted vigil was snarling and snapping at me in the dark depths of the living room and the only thing keeping me alive was the circle of protection I had cast as an afterthought, never dreaming I’d actually be in need of it. While that was a big bully for me, I had no idea how long it would hold or what to do when it broke.

But that was not my most pressing problem – there was another darker behemoth lurking underneath that disturbed me more. This creature defiling my house and every waking moment for two interminable days had in fact been stalking me between worlds since I could remember. So long in fact, I’d begun to forget about it, sheltered as I was by the strong wards that guarded my flat. But someone had broken those wards and if I survived, I intended to find out who that particular meddling bastard was and arrange their imminent, screaming demise.

The thing glared at me with red, slanted eyes, howling like a banshee until the ringing in my ears eclipsed the sight of the triple rows of its mismatched teeth.

The protective circle chose that moment to break. It was on me in one loping bound, malformed jaws snapping for the fresh meat of my throat.

But there are worse fates than being eaten alive and I was about to find out the hard way just what they were….

‘Okay,’ said Rufus, ‘this is what we know. Some time in the evening of 28th May this year, Robyn Farquhar aged ten, ran out of her parent’s flat in Forrest Road into the street. They thought she was tucked up in bed with a cold and didn’t know any different until they heard the sound of sirens outside. Robyn had been found by a passer-by in a state of unconsciousness. She was taken to the Edinburgh’s Sick Children’s Hospital where she remains in a coma rated, so I’m told, as a 4 on Glasgow Coma scale. This means she can open her eyes but there’s no one home.’
‘Rufus, please, this is a child we’re talking about,’ said Ruby.
I rolled my eyes and got another drink up.
‘Just trying to cut to the chase Rubes. There is some neurological activity, but not a great deal. She’s been in that state now for seven months and doctors are not hopeful because they don’t know what has caused the coma. Also not helping is the fact that it’s a deep one and it’s lasted for a long time.’
‘Her parents Pat and Gordon got in touch with me because they’ve been, well, hearing things in their flat and they think it’s haunted,’ said Ruby.
‘What sort of things?’ I asked.
“Started off as whispers, shit where it shouldn’t be, hey, that sounds like a good t-shirt slogan for an exorcist, don’t you think? Never mind, where was I? Oh yes, banging on walls, you know the usual,’ said Rufus. ‘But then it changed. Became more heavy-duty, nastier, if you get my drift.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘not unless you spell it out for me. And as for the slogan, you stole that from me when we were at Michael and Vic’s.’
‘And what a laugh that turned out to be. Okay then, voices late at night dredging up old secrets from the past, like Gordon’s affair, which Pat didn’t know about. Pat’s obsession with an ex, that Gordon didn’t know about and it went downhill from there. Things got more physical so to speak: plates being thrown and not just by the unhappy couple you understand, furniture upended, food spoiling in the fridge despite being just bought. Just you know, your classic demonic manifestations.’
‘Which is why you’re involved,’ I said. ‘So, correct me if I’m wrong but we’ve gone from a child lapsing into a coma to possible demonic possession, not of the child, but of the flat where she lived? Is that even possible?’
‘It’s not common, but having consulted the grimoires, it is possible. As you’ll know from your boyfriend Lukastor, there are many types of demon. Some possess places rather than humans. They are like humanity in that they can evolve to fit the conditions. They’re essentially parasites, arguably also like humanity. Anyway, that was the theory we were working on until Ruby did her thing and tried to contact Robyn. Take it away Rubes.’
‘Gordon and Pat gave me some of Robyn’s things,’ she indicated the objects on the table, ‘and I thought I’d give it a go even though we knew Robyn wasn’t dead. You remember that’s how I found Steph or Sophie or whatever she called herself.’
‘Oh, I think I still have a vague memory,’ I said getting an unwelcome flashback to our little showdown on the Castle esplanade with a particularly vile serial killer and pulling myself back with no little effort.
Outside something thumped against the window, a dark shape disappearing into the swirling snow.
“Brandy for everyone?’ said Ruby, pouring it out before I could stop her. The light was fading and I didn’t want to be here any longer than I had to. The photos on Ruby’s Wall of Death were also starting to creep me out. Unlike Ruby, I lived in the present and had no need of the dark, cloying weight of the past and the wants and needs of others dragging me down into it.
‘But I still don’t get why the parents wanted you to find her. They know where she is – she’s lying unconscious in the Sick Kids. If they’ve now got a haunting or possession surely that’s a separate thing? Hell it could have been triggered by events. There’s a missing link here, the one between the child and the goings-on.’
‘Pat and Gordon believe that someone, something has taken Robyn’s soul and is holding it captive,’ said Ruby.
‘Based on?’
‘Based on the fact that there is no physical explanation that can be found for the coma. Robyn hasn’t suffered a stroke, heart-attack, nor does she have a head wound. The entity in their flat knows things about Pat and Gordon that only Robyn would know.’
‘It might just be a powerful demon. It doesn’t mean something’s got hold of Robyn’s spirit.’
‘You don’t understand Rose,’ said Ruby. ‘They don’t just think the entity has Robyn, they think it is Robyn, in part anyway.’
‘That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard,’ I said. ‘How could it be Robyn, partly, wholly or any other way? And where does the captivity bit fit in?’
‘Well first off we don’t have all the answers and the ones we do beg more questions. I went to see Pat and Gordon last week and it was clear to me that they were, well, scared of Robyn, there’s no other way to put it. I don’t just mean now, but before the coma too. It turns out she’s psychic and, by their accounts, a very powerful one. She always knew things she wasn’t supposed to. Can’t be easy for the parents when dead members of the family and other random spirits are spilling secrets to their ten year old who then spills them at school until pretty soon there aren’t any left. Especially when as you know most people prefer to live in denial of that sort of thing. So some of the stuff the voices were saying wasn’t so dissimilar to what Robyn used to reveal. But there was a nastier edge to the goings on that weren’t typical of their child an intent you might say.’
‘While my heart really does bleed, there’s still not enough evidence to support what you’re saying,’ I told her.
‘I’m sorry Rose, I’m not explaining this very well. What I’m trying to say is that when I tried to contact Robyn, I was successful and she…spoke to me.’
I made a circling motion with my hand. Day was bleeding into night and the flat’s interior grew gloomier with every passing second.
‘She said that she was scared,’ Ruby continued, ‘that she didn’t know where she was, that she wanted to come home but couldn’t – and that she had a message for you. For you Rose,’ she looked at me with frightened eyes. ‘Why would she have a message for you?’
‘In the name of god woman,’ I said, hand over my eyes.
‘She said was to tell you that ‘The Ice Cream Man Cometh.’ Does that mean anything to you Rose? Rose?’

By the time I got to the Cowgate, one of the victims was already dead, his decapitated body slung into the waiting Transit van. His two male companions had been captured and pinned against the wall at the back of the Snake-Pit club. The taller of the two, a boy who didn’t look old enough to be out of school let alone out on the tiles, began to plead for his life.
The vampire holding him growled, trailing a taloned claw across the boy’s neck turning the flow of words into blood. The wound was not deep enough to kill, but it confirmed that these three monsters were out of control. On the bright side, it looked like the boy was going to get the chance to paint the town red after all.
All of the vampires were blond, female and bore a striking resemblance to Morgana their Queen, so my source had been correct in that respect at least. The erstwhile driver of the van had abandoned her post at the wheel and was, from the sound of cracking bones, worrying the corpse while the other two played with their food.
With a cursed blade in each hand I crept around to the open doors at the back of the vehicle, breath pluming in the arctic night air. I needn’t have bothered with stealth because the corpse-botherer was too busy pulling the entrails out of the belly like so many linked sausages, snarls of appetite muffled by the corpse’s head which it gripped in its teeth.
The coppery tang of blood was strong and the Deadlights, that sixth sense I’d been born with, gift and nightmare in equal parts was eager to be free. It invaded the memories and thoughts of dead and living alike without fear or favour, consuming a portion of whatever it touched. And, like the parasite that I was, that meant I did too.
It was for that very reason that the Deadlights were out of luck tonight because I didn’t fancy chowing down on vampire. That left only good, old-fashioned brute force.
“Oi,” I said as though talking to a bothersome dog who had been rooting in the bins.
There was a beat of silence before she turned towards me, blood-soaked blond hair black in the sodium lights, teeth buried in the tender flesh of the corpses cheek. She shook her head, the flesh gave way and the head dropped with a thunk onto the floor. She flew for me, teeth distended and snapping. I brought both daggers up as though making an offering and drove them deep into her heart. Stakes were for the movies and those foolish enough to set store by such things. Like all good arguments, all you needed was a point and enough wit to ram it home.
At least that was the theory…

I hurried down the hall past a mother cradling her two dead babies, with a third older child propped against her shoulder, smiling up at her and playing with the point of a knife. A couple of indeterminate age and sex were having what looked like hugely painful and non consensual sex on both their parts- no pun intended. I reached into the cupboard for my coat and found the ghost of a young girl of about three cutting herself absentmindedly on her bare forearms and thighs as the blood dripped in a steady line onto the floor. They were becoming more realistic the longer I spent in the house and I wasted no more time. I ran upstairs pushing my way past a sea of rapidly multiplying faces trying to tune them out with only partial success.

I ran into my room, picking up my scrying glass, wallet, mobile and on second thoughts the ouija board that I kept for emergencies and scurried back downstairs back through the press of spectral presences. Blindly groping for the catch on the front door, I felt a pressure on my arm and turned round to see the woman with the dead babies. Her eyelids and lips had been sewn shut and she seemed to be trying to tell me something through the bindings. The fact that I could now feel them was very bad and it would be a matter of seconds before sound exploded in the house like a detonated bomb. They were gaining power and it had to be something to do with the dead crossing over where the membrane to our world had worn thin. I saw the doll Lucille had made of Henry on the hall table and on impulse snatched the repulsive thing because it wouldn’t do to leave something as powerful as that unattended for dead hands to make mischief with. You just never knew. I briefly wondered how Ruby was handling the Edinburgh situation before I swung the door open and threw myself across the threshold, shaking off a withered old hand in the process that was hanging onto my leg.

I backed away from the house clutching coat and gear and looked back at the house. I could see a multitude of the dead crowded at every window including the one in the front door. They weren’t doing anything now, as though all that activity had been a show for my benefit. I wondered when they’d gather the power to leave the house. I’d never seen such an escalation of power in what was a matter of minutes. Ruby’s words came back to me with a fresh urgency and I turned my back on the House of Blood and hurried into my car. I had to hurriedly scrape off the frozen accumulation of snow and put the heaters on full blast to deal with the ice that had collected on the inside of the windscreen. When I drove off, after what seemed like an age, I could feel innumerable sets of dead eyes, watching me, calculating what the next move would be.

I was wondering myself.

Who am I?

Well that's a good question and on bad days I'm not sure I know the answer.

My name though is Rose Garnett and I hunt down among the dead men in Edinburgh's necropolis. These story fragments are jagged little pills from my own personal stash; free, gratis and for nothing. For those of a more delicate disposition, there's always the Dead Central Soundtrack to help the medicine go down.

And to the select few wise enough to know nothing is for free, these little peep holes will reveal what's really waiting on the other side. Who knows, if you're very unlucky it may even be me...